UKIP isn’t going to fix your country – the party was effectively wiped out on Thursday. Its general secretary, Paul Oakley, pretty well nailed it on BBC Radio Four’s Today programme later when he likened UKIP to bubonic plague. “Think of the Black Death in the Middle Ages,” he said. “It comes along and it causes disruption and then it goes dormant, and that’s exactly what we are going to do.” Very apt.

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The Lib Dems’ USP is to reverse Brexit and yet, in spite of a huge constituency who want to stay in Europe, they made only limited gains. Sir Vince Cable is not going to fix your country.

Yet a decent leader ought to have emerged by now, given the turmoil we have been through. The Tories have been on the ropes for months, plagued by infighting and a series of shocking cock-ups.

The last thing any Conservative would want in the circumstances would be an election, wouldn’t they? Sooner go surfing the giant waves at Nazaré in Portugal.

Well, not quite. On a day when Tories feared a wipe-out, the surf barely growled.

The Conservatives lost a handful of council seats and saw Plymouth City Council disappear into the Corbyn pocket. But the fact that Jezza trekked all the way to the Westcountry in the early hours to congratulate Labour leader Tudor Evans on winning back the city council tells you something. The time is ripe for a new force in the centre of British politics, combining the moderate majorities of all three parties. Sadly it is difficult to find a politician with the guts to deliver one.

The political landscape may not be set in stone, but it has always taken a seismic convulsion to shift it. If Brexit is not exactly that kind of earthquake, I don’t know what is.

In a 1993 outburst, former Tory Prime Minister John Major called three of his Eurosceptic Cabinet members “bastards”. Quite a few more have come out of the woodwork since, yet they still represent only about a fifth of the 318 MPs. Jeremy Corbyn and his inner circle are probably an even smaller fraction of the Labour Party.

You might imagine that ideology would prevent the one-time enemies joining forces, but you’d be wrong. There is less difference between politicians on the near-Left and near-Right than you might think. They bellow at each other across the Dispatch Box but, like footballers, their fanaticism has more to do with tribal loyalty than with real convictions.

Ask Alexis Sanchez, who now gets a hero’s welcome at Manchester United after defecting from Arsenal.

The British are a middle-of-the-road lawn-mowing kind of people, and we would warmly embrace a middle-of-the-road political party with a charismatic leader. If only we had one.